Leveraging Talent intelligence in AI-Era Recruitment

Talent intelligence refers to the efforts of an organization to collect, analyze, and leverage as a true asset all useful and reliable internal and external workforce, industry, and labor market data.

External ‘TI’ data is often largely about the company’s competition and surrounding industry dynamics and data points. Internal information in the scope of a talent intelligence initiative almost always includes current and future labor and skill needs and corresponding gaps.

Moreover, talent intelligence efforts are usually more successful if external data or industry benchmarks are used within comparisons against an organization’s trends and results.

Just as an AI image generator can create visuals by combining different data inputs to produce a cohesive image, talent intelligence synthesizes various data points to form a clear and actionable picture of workforce dynamics.

Compensation practices or the pricing of jobs and job families is considered foundational benchmark data, but other common data comparisons and trendlines in the TI realm include various staffing ratios, cuts of demographic data, KPI’s like revenue per employee, engagement, retention, and turnover rates and trendlines, relating the same to customer satisfaction levels, internal mobility and promotion rates, sources of new hires, candidate flow activity, trends around workforce size, HR department staffing in relation to workforce size (e.g., 1 HR staff per 100 employees is an oft-cited stat), time to productivity, etc.

‘PA’ encompasses the broader set of data that might relate to performance, engagement, productivity, or attrition. Examining this type of PA data, companies can make decisions regarding talent management, workforce planning, organizational design, and operational improvements among many other important HR / HCM endeavors.

➡️ As workforce, labor market and HCM-related data insights (aka talent intelligence) get increasingly diverse, far-reaching and inter-connected, more opportunities will no doubt arise for businesses investing in both TI and PA.

Of course, recruitment marketing in the AI 🤖 era also involves elevating the level of personalization in crafting the most effective employer value proposition, the ability to infer the presence of skills even if not explicitly highlighted or culture fit based on past job successes and employer reputations, improving employer brand attractiveness by following the prescriptive guidance of what approaches and strategies have worked to-date, and the degree of candidate fit being assessed across more dimensions than ever.

Also, with respect to the sourcing and use of gig workers, contingents and contractors, today’s corresponding set of processes clearly extends further in scope than just procurement, deployment and cost management elements.

⚠️ Other critical activities relative to these non-employees include optimizing their scheduling, onboarding, evaluation and as-needed coaching while still ensuring compliance with all relevant IRS worker classification and management rules.

Finally, it should be noted that whether an organization uses gig workers, contractors, contingents or regular employees, all these workforce segments can help, or hurt, the reputation of a business.